The perfect gameday parking space.

Paul Fredenberg | Contributor

“Are we there yet?”

“How much longer?”

“How many more miles?”

We weren’t on the interstate. We weren’t on a road trip. We weren’t even in the car. The kids and I were walking across the Old West Side, headed toward Crisler Arena. We were going to a basketball game.

“Trust me, this is for your own good,” I told the kids. “You’ll thank me someday.”

I’ve inherited a lot of nice things from my dad — my height, my taste in movies and books, a soft spot for family vacations — but I’ve also inherited one particularly debilitating sickness: a steadfast refusal to pay for stadium parking. As a kid, going to games with Dad meant almost always bringing your walking shoes. Unless it was to a Tigers or Red Wings game — in downtown Detroit — in which case it meant bringing your running shoes.

I have no problem with the concept of paying for parking. I’ll gladly do it downtown when taking a client to dinner, or at the airport on a business trip, or, for that matter, in any other spot where I can plausibly expense it to my employer.

But ever since I was a boy I have been conditioned to believe that it is criminal to pay $5, much less $10 or $20, to park at a ball game. Not when perfectly convenient parking spots are available for free, "convenient" being a largely relative term.

Growing up, the only times I recall ever parking close to a sporting venue were during our summer vacations. The big Ford Country Squire would exit the interstate at one of the college towns and head directly to the football stadium. After being cooped up for so many miles, my brothers and I would literally burst out of the station wagon and race down the stadium tunnel and out onto the field to an imaginary, thunderous ovation.

On those stadium visits we “left it all on the field” as they say, which for us included not just effort and sweat, but also large patches of skin, lots of teeth, and enough blood to open a local chapter of the Red Cross. The unforgiving, abrasive Astroturf surfaces gnawed away at our young elbows and knees, and after we’d had enough diving, tackling and celebratory football spiking Dad would take a few pictures and we’d all limp back to the car. Thankfully we didn’t have to go far. In summer the stadium parking was free.

There was once a time in my young professional life when I didn’t have to choose between trips to the orthodontist and season tickets, but now, with my own children slowly creeping toward adolescence, I’ve come to understand my dad’s calculus a bit better. It’s not cheap to raise a family. And the biggest line item — college — is only getting bigger each year.

But the kids love going to Michigan Stadium, and to Yost and Crisler with me as much as I did with my dad. So we make little sacrifices. And parking is the low-hanging fruit.

When I glide into a parking spot far from the game venue, the money I would otherwise spend on more convenient parking I put into a little account I keep in my head. These are the funds I’ve determined we’ll use to buy the kids’ college textbooks. So I call it “textbook parking.”

And after we double knot our laces we’ll line our pockets with fruit snacks, chocolate bars, beef jerky, and gum — “textbook eating” — just in case we don’t make it to a friendly tailgate where the harvest is ample and free. And then we’ll set off walking to the game.

On a long flight home from a recent business trip, I sat next to a doctor, a big Michigan fan. After we exhausted the topic of football, we discussed our families. His oldest daughter is heading to college next year, and he’s been saving for her tuition through the Michigan Education Trust.

“I’ve been making little deposits,” he said, “$10,000 here and $10,000 there. It starts to really add up.”

At that point I tried to steer the conversation back to anything — the recent spate of airline crashes, the federal budget crisis, the Rich Rodriguez era at Michigan — that would deflect attention from my own catastrophe of a college savings plan. I didn’t want to admit that my “trust” also involved periodic little “deposits” — in the form of empty soda bottles. Ten cents at a time.

But while I haven’t exactly made much progress on saving for all that tuition, I think we’re doing just fine on the textbooks.

Or so I thought.

After the basketball game, the kids and I swung by campus on our way back to the car. We ducked inside one of the bookstores to warm up and, for old times’ sake, I wandered over to the textbook section. The books looked remarkably similar to the ones I used 15 years ago, the only notable difference being the much larger edition numbers. Maybe, I thought, like in the case of the Honda Accord, the 15th edition of the Calculus textbook represented a marked improvement over the third. Then again, like in the case of the Country Squire, maybe it didn’t.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry when I saw the materials for Chem 210 — Organic Chemistry — now pushing $250 a set. “And I thought organic milk was expensive,” I muttered to myself.

On the walk back to the car with the kids, between breaking down both the ball game and our favorite pizza toppings, I tried to imagine how the price of those textbooks, like my healthcare premiums, could continue to rise exponentially each year. Especially considering that, in the meantime, the price of a decent gameday parking spot — it’s been $10 for as long as I can remember — hasn’t changed much at all.

I never did come up with an answer, though I did feel comfort in knowing that I at least had a plan. Walking back to our distant textbook parking spot, as I savored this latest memory together with the kids, it dawned on me that, given what I had just observed in the bookstore, we would need to make some major adjustments regarding how we were planning for college.

For one, I thought, if we were ever going to eventually pay for all those textbooks, we would have to start going to a lot more ballgames.

Paul Fredenberg lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and seven children. He can be reached at psfredenberg@gmail.com.